Life in the green fast lane

Menu

Jeopardy

On Wednesday November 26, the long running show Jeopardy had a category entitled “A Visit to Tesla” during the first round. In this round there were six categories: Dinner and a Broadway Show, 3-Letter Words, Half a TV Title Pair, Second Book in the Series, Americana, and a Visit To Tesla. The Tesla category was introduced through a video which said “A visit to Tesla Motors, turning electric cars into the first successful American auto startup in almost a century.” The contestants finally got to the Tesla category after using all the other categories first!

For those readers not familiar with Jeopardy, the answers are given and the contestants need to come up with the appropriate question.

The answers for the Tesla category were in a video format but the questions here are in text form:

Unlike an internal combustion gas engine with many moving parts, a Tesla motor only has one: the rotor. As a result, this increase in velocity is instantaneous, allowing you to go from 0 to 60 in 4.2 seconds.

The body of each car begins with a giant 20,000 pound coil of this metal, atomic #13, which will be stretched, bent, punched, painted and more before it is done.

As the body of a Tesla comes together, several joining methods are used including adhesive, cold metal transfer, self piercing rivets and the resistance type of this metallurgic technique.

In 2013 9 years ahead schedule, Tesla Motors paid back 465 Million dollars in loans from this United States government department that is rightly interested in Tesla’s advanced technology.

Drawing on ideas conceived by Nikola Tesla himself, the motors used in all Tesla cars make use of this phenomena by which the spinning of a metallic rotor inside of a magnetic field creates an electrical current.

The resulting questions that the contestants needed to give were:

What is acceleration?

What is aluminum?

What is welding?

What is energy?

What is electro magnetic induction?

One contestant got the first four answers correct but did not know the final $1,000 question.